As an elegant maestro of mirage and delusion drapes his beautiful female assistant with a gauzy textile, much to our amazement, the lady vanishes into thin air.
Director: Georges Méliès
Stars: Jehanne d'Alcy, Georges Méliès
IMDB: http://www.im…
As an elegant maestro of mirage and delusion drapes his beautiful female assistant with a gauzy textile, much to our amazement, the lady vanishes into thin air.
Director: Georges Méliès
Stars: Jehanne d'Alcy, Georges Méliès
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000075/
The movie is in the public domain.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_Lady
The Vanishing Lady or The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin (French: Escamotage d'une dame chez Robert-Houdin) is an 1896 French short silent trick film directed by Georges Méliès.
Synopsis
A magician walks onto a stage and brings out his assistant. He spreads a newspaper on the floor (thus demonstrating that no trap door is hidden there) and places a chair on top of it. He has his assistant sit in the chair, and spreads a blanket over her. When he removes the blanket, she has disappeared. He then waves his arms in the air and conjures up a skeleton. He places the blanket over the skeleton and removes it to reveal his assistant, alive and well.
Production
Méliès himself is the magician in the film; his assistant is Jehanne d'Alcy.[1]
The film is based on a magic act developed by the French magician Buatier de Kolta. When the illusion was produced onstage, a trapdoor was used to create the appearances and disappearances; for the film, however, Méliès needed no trapdoor, using instead an editing technique called the substitution splice. The Vanishing Lady marks Méliès's first known use of the effect.[1]
Release
The Vanishing Lady was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 70 in its catalogues.[2] Though the surviving print of the film is in black-and-white, hand-colored prints of Méliès's films were also sold; the Méliès expert Jacques Malthête reconstructed a hand-colored version of the film in 1979, using authentic materials.[1]
